


Perihelion

by Zeke Black (istia)



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: M/M, Old West, POV Ezra Standish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 10:11:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2728478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/Zeke%20Black
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not all desert nights are cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perihelion

Chris came to him in the dark heart of the night when the pools of light around the street fires were thin and fragile as ghosts.

Or, alternately, he joined Chris, walking with muffled steps in the street's dust or mud to avoid the loud cracks of his boots against the boardwalks in the still night air, hugging the deepest shadows against the buildings like a Gila monster. He eschewed his red and purple coats, bright vests, and shiny cuff links on those nights, leaving his room attired not as a peacock with his tail spread to attract attention, but with his plainest black coat and vest over a dull-colored shirt that would catch and reflect no hint of light.

Chris simply came as he always was: dark-clad alike in sunlight or shadows, fair hair hidden and face obscured under the wide brim of his Californio hat.

They made no plans beforehand for these nights. They'd devised no secret, complex signals to indicate a rendezvous desired and accepted, a time and place silently agreed upon, nor did they seek out each other's eyes with meaningful intent. Neither of them left his door unlocked nor a candle burning, or changed his nightly routine in any way. They drank as much or as little each evening as they pleased, alone or in concert with companions; lingered late or retired early as it suited them: But when they went to their beds, they always lay alone.

Neither he nor Chris had need for request and response, no reason to gauge interest or secure consent. When cupidity prompted, one or the other of them simply rose from his own bed and blended with the night in a course true as a homing pigeon's. They used their keys on each other's doors as on their own, undressed in pitch-black spaces they could navigate blindfolded, and slipped between sheets into warm, mute welcome as dependable and expected as the rise and fall of the tides, as known as the whiskey on the breath that met their own.

He spilled words against the rough entrapment of Chris's skin, loquacious as his nature dictated, but tempered to murmurs in fear of discovery and reprisal, of gunfire in the night and a scaffold at dawn.

Chris, equally true to himself, was as laconic when the two of them were alone as he was wont to be in company, but Chris's kisses were louder than Ezra's susurration while their touch burned hotter on each other's skin than the blaze of the noonday sun; incendiary as a lightning strike, strong as a flash flood.

They rubbed each other to slick hardness in the heat between their bellies, rough-haired skin and gripping fingers and the snap of their hips inflaming desires hot as the desert noon. Sometimes he fucked Chris and sometimes he spread himself open for Chris, still without the need for words, for any exchange as formal and cool as proposal and agreement. They moved together like the turn of the moon through its phases, natural and unbridled, tonguing sweat from the curves of spine and ass and breastbone.

Falling asleep afterwards, mutually satiated, their legs tangled together, Chris's fingers would encircle his wrist or Ezra's palm flatten against Chris's chest to absorb the thump of his heart, with the mingled scents of their sweat and sex a soporific cloud encasing them like smoke in an opium den.

Then he'd wake, or Chris would, to slip away with a parting caress or the press of lips like a brand, into the fading dark with the only witnesses of their return passage the cold light of the stars and a bright-eyed crow on the church spire.

:::::::

In daylight, they were, in Josiah's terminology, brethren, though Ezra preferred comrades-in-arms. Two components of a unity of seven. The most strikingly unalike, he and Chris, even within their disparate group, the noisy peacock and the silent man in black comprising stark contrast and differences. They ignored each other between exchanges of sarcastic quips and sardonic looks cut with occasional amusement, and no one in their tiny burg could conceive of them as anything other than working associates.

In night's cover, they became other: less than two, more than one in congress so heated it burned away all seeming difference and left them raw and aching, fulfilled and exhilarated, sated...yet still wanting, always and ever.


End file.
